VANCE URGES PROACTIVE APPROACH TO DISCOVERING HEALTH EFFECTS OF EAST PALESTINE DISASTER

President Biden plans to make his first visit here Friday, but Sen. J.D. Vance came on Feb. 3. That was exactly a year after a train derailed and spilled vinyl chloride, causing a massive fire and a billowing cloud of toxic smoke that rolled over this city of some 4,700. Days after the derailment, residents were evacuated again as emergency crews conducted a “controlled burn” to prevent an even larger explosion.

Mr. Vance came to the Senate in January 2023 as a MAGA bomb-thrower, and he often lives up to that reputation. On Feb. 4 he told ABC News that if he had been vice president in 2021, “I would have told the states . . . that we needed to have multiple slates of electors, and I think the U.S. Congress should have fought over it from there.” On Feb. 6 he rejected the Senate immigration compromise and called the expectation that Republicans should support it “pure, unadulterated bulls—.”

But a more conciliatory side of Mr. Vance is on display in East Palestine. In a meeting at a local church, he sits with constituents for more than an hour, takes questions, listens, presses for details, and talks about how sick he felt after his first visits here. He takes no swipes at Mr. Biden as he encourages residents to press the White House for a comprehensive “baseline” testing program that would aim at early detection of health problems caused by the disaster. But he does criticize the president in an interview after the meeting with constituents.

He tells me he doesn’t want people who live here to have to fight the government for years to prove their injuries. He cites the litigation over the Camp Lejeune Marine base, where the Department of Health and Human Services found in 2007 that the water was contaminated with toxic chemicals from 1953 through 1987. The Camp Lejeune Justice Act of 2022 established a process for adjudicating claims, and the first ones were settled in November 2023.

Mr. Vance wants the government to be proactive about the health risks. He envisions a program in which epidemiologists, toxicologists, cancer researchers and other experts would regularly test residents for abnormal health conditions. “If you talk to people—this is people who want to move on from this disaster . . . they want to know with confidence that 10 years down the road, if something happens to their kids, God forbid, or themselves, they can trace it to this accident or not.” He has asked the administration to allocate $5 million to develop such a program, which hasn’t been tried before.

Mr. Vance says his pitches have left the administration “completely unmoved”: “I cannot get the White House to give a crap about these people,” he says. “They gave my deputy chief of staff a lecture about what the National Institutes of Health does” when he asked for an NIH grant.

Mr. Vance adds, with his characteristic populist bluntness: “I’m going to hope that they get off their asses to do something.”

For Background: 

• Senator Vance has called for federal funding of a long-term health testing program for weeks. Such a program could cost $15 million over its lifespan, including $5 million in start up costs. To date, the White House has refused to provide funding.